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Like you're looking off to the left, and you see someone you have to shoot to the right. You move the mouse, and suddenly your entire field of vision moves without you shifting your head or eyes about to track the reticle in the dead center of the screen. You'd always have to move your head in near perfect coordination with your mouse to keep from feeling weird.

Yes, this is precisely why the deadzone is important, it lets you aim around a bit without moving your view around, which helps prevent nausea.

Anyway, HL2 is just one example of FPS controls with the Rift. Time Rifters for example has a system where your crosshair is always centered in your view, so where you look is always where you'll shoot. Just like any gaming peripheral it'll likely take a while before any kind of standard emerges, like WASD+mouse is in FPS's today. Remember how that evolved? First FPS control was all keyboard, then someone thought of using the mouse as well so then it was arrow keys+mouse, then someone thought of the crazy idea of having WASD be the movemment keys instead. I'm sure we'll see a bunch of different configurations still, including ZB's "mech" controls. For my money, the Time Rifters controls feel good, but I prefer HL2's system.

Anyway, enough about HL2's controls scheme. Strike Suit Zero was so damn awesome I just had to record a video of it!

When I first tried it in the Rift I felt like the FOV was way too low. I read somewhere that it's around 45 and that sounds about right. I know it looks quite wide in the video but most of that is far out in your peripheral vision and what you're actually seeing is very narrow. But you know what? It works! It does get disorienting occasionally when you're being bombarded by heavy fire and indicators are flashing all over the screen, but I figure that's only realistic. Also, the HUD takes some getting used to. It's straight ahead of you, and very close. If you look in the upper left corner you can see objectives, lower right is video comm, etc.

Anyway, there's a problem with this game, and it's something I've run into a few times over this past week. It's an issue knows as... Rift Drift.

There's something off about the Rift in certain games. The view keeps sliding to the left, or right, almost imperceptibly. I think I first encountered it when I tried Portal 2. I got the gamepad's cord wrapped around my leg and when I took the headset off to inspect I realized that I was facing away from my computer. I had swiveled in my officechair bit by bit, adjusting to the new centerpoint of the game, which had slowly crept off to the left. There's a fix for this already, you can configure it in the Oculus SDK Calibration tool, but not all games use the data from this tool, so in some games, like Strike Suit Zero, your view will keep drifting to the side. How much it drifts seems to vary from time to time, when I recorded the video above it didn't happen until after I'd stopped recording. Thankfully most games have a "re-center Oculus Rift" key, which you can press once you're facing forward again, but this unfortunately does not stop the drift, so you'll have to keep pressing that key intermittently.

Anyway, despite that, Strike Suit Zero is a blast. Being able to look off to the side or up to see where the bogeys are feels awesome.

I'm sure we'll see a bunch of different configurations still, including ZB's "mech" controls. For my money, the Time Rifters controls feel good, but I prefer HL2's system.

Same here. The mech controls are more in line with what we're used to, and the first wave of Rift games will probably use it more than any other method at first. But now that we've finally got a good piece of VR, and some decent gyroscope equipped wand style controller tech a'la the Wiimote, there's no reason to couple your arm to your eye anymore. It's not as realistic, and it's not as cool.

Look around with your head, aim with your hand and arm. That's the way it should be done. Sorta like this...

...but without as much granular control of the environment. That'd be too much for a fast paced FPS (though it still could be cool if it ends up being done well).

I think you could treat this whole problem quite comfortably simply by having a modifier key to 'turn head only', e.g. hold Ctrl while head-tracking to turn head, don't hold Ctrl and your whole body will turn. It'll take a while to get used to though.

That might work for slower paced games, but for your bog standard FPSs, you'll want something that's immediate and can be done without thinking about it. A deadzone setup is better for that, in my opinion.

Though from that video Henke posted (awesome), it looks like the Rift is aware enough of your orientation that you can pivot in place to turn around ingame. If there's no trickery behind what we were watching (like he was rotating using the analog stick while moving around to make it look like the Rift was picking up his position), then that's the perfect setup for a VR first person game.

I believe the Razer Hydra handles a lot of the positional tracking in that video. He has one of the handheld devices in his hands, and the other in the pouch around his torso. He uses the thumbstick on the Hydra to walk around in-game.

Look around with your head, aim with your hand and arm. That's the way it should be done. Sorta like this...

In real life, I can look over my shoulder without my entire body spinning to face the direction I'm looking (thus also spinning the view away from what I was actually looking at). Tank-style control with your neck seem like a lose/lose from a precision and physical strain perspective.

Eh, not sure I'm interpreting either of your posts correctly, but to explain how it actually handles: yes, the movement direction is determined by what way you're looking, so you could say that your body rotates with the view. When you look 90 degrees to the right and press forward you will move in that direction, however you gun arm will still be pointing forward, that is 90 degrees to the left. So far I can't really say this has caused any problems. I guess theoretically there could be points where you were running from something and wanted to look back over your shoulder, that wouldn't be possible since it'd change your movement direction. Instead you have to do it the old FPS way of turning around and running backwards if you want to look at something behind you, which is what I've been doing anyway. Old habits die hard.

I'd need to try an FPS with "mech controls" to determine which one felt more natural.

I'm thinking of it as an extension of the control scheme in Metroid Prime 3, which was, in my totally and completely subjective opinion, the only FPS setup that could rival the classic keyboard and mouse. HL2 aped it by quite a bit, and I liked it immediately because of that.

But ZB might be right. What worked on a flat screen a few feet away from you, where all the action is controlled completely by your arms and wrists might not work with the Rift. I personally think it'll work better than the scheme he's proposing, but I can't say that for a fact until I've spent some time playing with it myself.

This is just about a brand new field we're all playing in. Like you said previously, it'll take some time and experimentation before we have a standardized control method that everyone agrees works best for everything.

Poking through the Oculus Rift reddit, found some people talking about ARMA and the TrackIR head tracker. Seems like this combination controls the way I've been describing-- M+KB to move/aim, with the head tracking used to look around and lean. Looks pretty natural.

ZylonBane: As far as I'm concerned, that's how they should implement it for Oculus Rift, i.e. decoupling (at least optionally) view from the direction that your body is oriented towards and that you're moving in.

It's a bit odd on TrackIR at first, but that's mostly because while you move your head your eyes still look forward at the screen. With OR, you wouldn't have that - you'd look in the direction your head is turned.

From what I've heard, the way they handle it in HL2 works pretty well, but I'm certain that in the long run the best OR games will 'decouple' head and body, so to speak - as is already done in the Arma games and in the upcoming Sir, You Are Being Hunted. That's also how it's handled in Elite: Dangerous, sims and racing games with in-cockpit view. It makes sense, though I don't know how well it'll work with more twitchy shooters.

There's a part in one of the later Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy books about a machine that destroys men's minds by showing them the size of the universe, and then showing them how small and insignificant they are in comparison. I belive Titans Of Space on the Oculus Rift might be a prototype for this machine. The Rift gives you a very good sense of scale and distance in virtual worlds, and Titans Of Space uses those very things to take you on a trip around our solar system, and then once it's done with that it shows you what a miniscule spec of dust our system is in comparison to the galaxy. It's mindboggling stuff.

So yes, I've already tried that one. Blue Marble was pretty nice too, though there's not much to it, but I haven't tried the Spirited Away boiler room yet. Downloading that, along with Seinfeld's appartment.

It's not much, but thought I'd mention that I managed to try out the Occulus Rift at the SXSW Gaming Expo. I only got about say 5 minutes trying it out on a horror game called Dark Deception.

The developers of this particular game chose to make it so that you could turn the camera using both the mouse or your head movement with the rift. Felt a little disorienting and I had to get used to it. I heard the developer tell someone something along the lines that they felt this was the best method they could come up with right now, but that there isn't really any correct way to utilize the rift. I guess it sort of comes down to personal preference.

I kind of felt like I had "tunnel vision" and someone even used that term to describe the experience. I also noticed what appeared to be pixels(?) on the screen, almost as if you put your face real close to a TV set and saw the pixels. I'd really like to try more, as I didn't get very long to play obviously.

Oh yeah, and what was really cool is they had the Omni device set up at a booth and at one point I saw someone demoing HL2 coupling the Omni with the Occulus Rift. I didn't try it myself but it was cool to see it in person.

I haven't played it yet, but the Humble Store currently has a first-person horror game with Rift support called "Doorways" (chapters 1 & 2) for $2.50 (75% discount). The trailer was encouraging enough for me to take a punt at that price.